Ronnie Lippens

Law, Code and Late Modern Governance in Prophetic Painting: Notes on Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Gilles Deleuze

This contribution argues that forms of governance and the forms of life of which they are part first emerge in the visual sphere, particularly in painting. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s work on painting, this paper illustrates this position by showing how the immediate post-war work of painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko can be said to crystallize traces of an emerging post-material, post-constructive, or late modern form of life and governance.

Radical sovereignty and control society: Images of late modern sovereignty in Rebeyrolle’s Le Cyclope

In this contribution it is argued that the late Paul Rebeyrolle’s (1926–2005) painting Le Cyclope (1987) subtly weaves together two images of sovereignty (conceived here as ‘control over emergence’), producing a third which expresses a vision of sovereignty as grounded in creative capacity. In Rebeyrolle’s Le Cyclope, control over emergence is achieved in and through creation. As such this French painter’s work attempts to show a way out of the predominant late modern desire for and will to sovereignty which is all about the radical, relentless and unrelenting flight from law and code. Such a radical and absolute imaginary, it is argued here, is bound to strand itself in paradox, and, ultimately, in the loss of all ‘control over emergence’. The paper also explores the relevance of Rebeyrolle’s images of late modern sovereignty for ‘control society’, in particular for phenomena such as ‘edgework’ and ‘precautionary cultures’.

Policing as Forestry? Re-Imagining Policing in Belgium

This article has two aims. First, it argues that social and political change, to a large extent, occurs and develops within the boundaries of the imaginary - the realm of ‘visibilities’, of affect, of the senses and of emotion. ‘Visibilities’, images and imageries often offer the bounding backdrop on, or within, which discursive or symbolic formations of social and political change occur and develop. This article also situates the ongoing debates on police reform in Belgium within social and political changes that are taking place in that country. Reading recent legislation on police reform as an expression, as well as a becoming of ‘policing as forestry’, we try to unearth the imaginary boundaries - the visibilities, the images and imageries - that structure at least part of the affective and emotional space within which discursive or symbolic expressions and becomings materialize in policies and legislation. As such, this article hopes to contribute to the study of (the emotionalities of) police reform, while it also hopes to show how policing - the symbolic and material practice of ordering and of organization - takes place against the backdrop of an often diffuse, though bounded, space of the imaginary. This article presents itself, simultaneously, as (1) an analysis of recent Belgian police reform and police reform legislation; (2) an archaeological evocation of Belgium’s recent social and political imaginary; (3) an elaboration of a new image of policing - policing as forestry - which may be able to subsume previous (allegedly incommensurable) models of policing.

The imaginary of ethical business practice

This essay aims to contribute to an unobtrusive criminology of organisation. In particular its focus is on organisational imagineries of ethical business practice. The essay thus is about organisational imageries and imagination, as well as about the connections between those and what might roughly be called organisational justice. This essay tries to find out whether the imaginery of specific organisations holds come clues as to the boundaries (of imagination) within which textual or practical forms of organisational justice may take shape. This essay is part of a broader, though fairly recent research agenda that deals with the role and impact of imagination in organisational life.

What Pollock and Rothko may have announced and restorative justice may have to deal with: sovereign victim culture

ABSTRACT A close reading of EU Directive 2012/29/EU of 25 October 2012 (EU Member States to comply by 16 November 2015), ‘establishing minimum standards on the rights, support and protection of victims of crime’, may reveal that a particular image of victimhood seems to be underpinning the text. This image projects victims as atomically separate entities who, clad in individual rights, may choose to ‘make contact’ (or not, as the case may be). An attempt will be made to argue that this image could be situated within a ‘sovereign victim culture’ that flourishes at the heart of what is often called ‘control society’. The origins of this culture, it shall further be argued, could be traced back to the aftermath of the Second World War, when elements of it first emerged in work by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. This culture is shot through with agony and as such threatens to undermine the conditions of possibility for transformative restorative justice.

When law became mobile: the birth of the haptic gaze between Van Eyck's Man in a Red Turban (1433) and da Messina's male Portrait series (1474–1478)

ABSTRACT Starting from a reflection on Erving Goffmans notion of strategic interaction, this contribution discusses a number of paintings, all completed between 1433 and 1478, to argue that the haptic gaze in painting probably emerged between those dates. The emergence of the haptic gaze – i.e. the gaze that touches and senses, inquires, inspects and surmises – announces the gradual crystallization of a burgher form of life in which responsiveness and an uneasy emotive mix of entrepreneurship and caution all come to subtly structure modes of social behaviour and interaction. This, to use other words, represents the birth of what one could call tactile modernity. In this emerging form of life, law suddenly becomes mobile: it forms in and through responsive, tactile and tactical movements, which, in turn, are constantly trying to sense laws contours.

Sensure? Public Art, Territorial Coding, and Censure

In this contribution it will be argued how public artworks tend to project morally coded auras on their surrounding territory. Analysing a number of well-known works of public art the argument will be made that territorial coding always and inevitably implies censure. Censure thus understood works largely through the sensory, bodily experience of the artworks aesthetic impact on those who cross its coded territory. Such aesthetic impact remains largely at a pre-conceptual or indeed even pre-linguistic level. Censure, in other words, does not necessarily need language. Censure also operates at the pre-conceptual level of sensory experience.

Law, Code, and Governance in Prophetic Painting: Notes on the Emergence of Early, High, and Late Modern Forms of Life and Governance

This contribution aims to demonstrate how forms of governance are inextricably intertwined with the forms of life that give rise to them and how such forms of life/governance tend to emerge, historically, in the sensory sphere – on canvas in particular – before they do so symbolically, or conceptually, in the spoken or written word. In other words, emerging forms of life/governance leave traces first in ‘prophetic’ painting before they do so in tracts, books, texts, film scripts, installation art, and so on. This is demonstrated with regard to three historical periods that, each, saw the birth of a particular form of life/governance, that is, early modernity (roughly from 1470 to 1520), high modernity (1750–1800), and late modernity (1940–1990). This contribution includes discussions of ‘prophetic paintings’ by early modern painters such as Jean Fouquet, Gerard David, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Antonello da Messina, and Quentin Metsys; high modern painters such as William Hogarth, Joseph Wright of Derby, and Henry Fuseli; and, finally, late modern painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.

The Light of High Modern Discipline: Viewing the Birth, Life and Death of the Disciplinary Society in William Hogarth, Joseph Wright of Derby and Edward Hopper

Scholars often discern a number of historical stages in the development of modernity. Early modernity saw the birth of modern, existential man (he or she, of course; henceforth: he). Man, so to speak, awoke to himself. The gradual emergence, during the fifteenth century, of opportunity and possibility, indeed of emergence itself, together with the confrontation with the difference of otherness, led to the generation, in the early modern burgher, of a delicate, almost tactile awareness of his intricately contingent world and his uncertain place in it. High Modernity then witnessed a preoccupation with light, particularly with the light that enlightens modern man on his excursions in the world. This is a light that does not just illuminate (or is supposed to illuminate) the path which the self is encouraged to carve out of the sheer potential of the world. It is not just a light that throws light on the carving self itself. It is also a light that should bathe the very process of carving itself in brightness. And more: this light, the light of High Modernity, is a light that is productive. It is a light that produces paths, carving selves, and the process of carving itself. This is a light without which nothing could possibly be carved out of the sheer rock of nature (or so it is assumed in High Modernity). Nothing could ever be produced without this light. This light is a productive light. It produces selves, paths, things, ways of seeing, ways of thinking, ways of governing, indeed, it produces ways of life. In short, it produces forms of life. This is perhaps another way of putting it: High Modern light produces High Modern forms of life. Without this light, there would be - or there would have been - no High Modern forms of life. This High Modern light differs from Platos light of reason or the divine light of scholasticism in that it is actively and directly productive. It does productive work. It produces subjects and societies. It produces forms of life. And it is produced by the latter in turn.

City Moves: An Essay in Honour of Ian Taylor

Books reviewed in this article: Vincenzo Ruggiero, Movements in the city. Conflict in the European metropolis Sophie Body-Gendrot, The social control of cities? A comparative perspective